A look at the #Bitcoin network transaction history - "current version of payment system not working as intended"

I have been reading an eye-opening paper by mathematicians Dorit Ron and Ami Shamir, looking at the entire transaction history of the Bitcoin network. For those unfamiliar with Bitcoin, it is a cryptographic currency that was created with the stated intention of generating a decentralised payment system for the Internet era (my earlier take on the idea here ). It has proved popular with computer enthusiasts, and specially with libertarians who see it as a perfect antidote against fiat monetary systems. So far Bitcoin has been riddled with security issues, theft, fraud, hacking and other problems that have meant that the scheme has failed to become popular outside of a core following of rabidly faithful enthusiasts. The paper contains some truly insightful figures that help to assess the Bitcoin experiment fully. There are 1,851,544 different Bitcoin owners. Given that at t...